Breeding Ground by Sarah Pinborough

 Well, I have learned something about contemporary English horror after having read "Rawhead Rex" and Breeding Ground: the English are fascinated with piss and pissing as a motif. I suppose there had to be a reason for their expressions like "piss off" and "are you taking a piss on me". What exactly that is, I don't know, but between Clive Barker's vulgar sprinkling of Declan Ewan and Sarah Pinborough's characters flooding their pants they at the least represent human degradation and fear. I shall christen the subgenre urinary horror.

That said, Breeding Ground had much more in common with I Am Legend than "Rawhead Rex". The sudden, inexplicable apocalypse that decimates society and the world, the monsters created by the apocalypse, the isolation of the protagonist, and a kind of mitigated hope, the one that tells you a lot of people are going to die, and while a few may survive, the kind of "human" world left behind will never be what we once had.

It's funny, but though we examined a chapter on beginnings in WWoH, the chapter on the middle seemed to deal in greater depth with the opening, or set up. 

I have mixed feelings about Pinborough's set up. In one sense, it felt stronger than Matheson's, or at least more horrifying. Matheson's monsters are created by infection and they can't help themselves; they are not intrinsically malevolent. At this stage of the game (though not at the time of original publication), vampires and zombies are passe, and Matheson's lacked intellect. The spiders, on the other hand, are uglier and more menacing in appearance, in the method of their production, and in Pinborough's imagery, which stakes out their malignant viciousness and the taunting of their prey.

Yet Matheson's writing seems much, much better to me. In fact, in a second sense Pinborough's use of pregnancy was laced with biting humor - Chloe (and others) getting fatter and nastier had a comic edge to it, one that bit into the shallowness of the male take on women in such situations. Pinborough keeps jabbing at males throughout the book, with Matt often the foil. Katie and Jane have to help him screw up his male courage and actually save him and the others.

What stood out the most to me in terms of technique was Pinborough's version of "the call of the hero". For one, though Matt is the protagonist, he isn't any more heroic than any of the other survivors. For another, we can say Matt's "call" to the heroic journey is more like a terrifying push or shove that forces him to run out of terror and into his adventure. I don't think we have Michael Laimo's utter failure of the first attempt to defeat the problem; rather, we have more of an evolutionary approach, where the writer, Pinborough, has the protagonist and other central characters experience the problem and develop an approach, not to utterly defeat the problem, but to survive. I would like to explore both those techniques in my writing.